Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Diane Monico, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
THE AMERICAN MIND
_The E. T. Earl Lectures_
1912
By the Same Author
The American Mind
Park-Street Papers
John Greenleaf Whittier: A Memoir
Walt Whitman
The Amateur Spirit
A Study of Prose Fiction
The Powers at Play
The Plated City
Salem Kittredge and Other Stories
The Broughton House
The American Mind
By Bliss Perry
[Illustration: The Riverside Press]
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY BLISS PERRY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1912_
TO
WALTER MORRIS HART
Preface
_The material for this book was delivered as the E. T. Earl Lectures
for 1912 at the Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and
I wish to take this opportunity to express to the President and Faculty
of that institution my appreciation of their generous hospitality._
_The lectures were also given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, the
Brooklyn Institute, and elsewhere, under the title "American Traits in
American Literature." In revising them for publication a briefer title
has seemed desirable, and I have therefore availed myself of
Jefferson's phrase "The American Mind," as suggesting, more accurately
perhaps than the original title, the real theme of discussion._
B. P.
CAMBRIDGE, 1912.
Contents
I. RACE, NATION, AND BOOK 3
II. THE AMERICAN MIND 47
III. AMERICAN IDEALISM 86
IV. ROMANCE AND REACTION 128
V. HUMOR AND SATIRE 166
VI. INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 209
THE AMERICAN MIND
I
Race, Nation, and Book
Many years ago, as a student in a foreign university, I remember
attacking, with the complacency of youth, a German history of the
English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author
reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the
opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great
Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant
hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and
environment in determining the character of any literary production,
what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have not the
chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast of England, have not the
fatness of the midland counties and the soft rainy climate of a North
Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-assertive folk that are
bred there, all left their trace upon _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and
_Every Man in his Humour_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_? Undoubtedly.
Latitude and longitude, soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial
origins and crossings, political and social and economic conditions,
must assuredly leave their marks upon the mental and artistic
productiveness of a people and upon the personality of individual
writers.
Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and whose _English
Literature_ remains a monument of the defects as well as of the
advantages of his method, was of course not the inventor of the
climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle, who discusses it in his
treatise on _Politics_. It was a topic of interest to the scholars of
the Renaissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth century, with an unction
of pseudo-science added to their natural patriotism, discovered in the
English climate one of the reasons of England's greatness. Thomas
Sprat, writing in 1667 on the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold
and asserts: "If there can be a true character given of the Universal
Temper of any Nation under Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed
to our countrymen, that they have commonly an unaffected sincerity,
that they love to deliver their minds with a sound simplicity, that
they have the middle qualities between the reserved, subtle southern
and the rough, unhewn northern people, that they are not extremely
prone to speak, that they are more concerned what others will think of
the strength than of the fineness of what they say, and that a
universal modesty possesses them. These qualities are so conspicuous
and proper to the soil that we often hear them objected to us by some
of our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful expressions.... Even the
position of our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the
composition of the English blood, as well as the embraces of the Ocean,
seem to join with the labours of the _Royal Society_ to render our
country a Land of Experimental Knowledge."
The excellent Sprat was the friend and executor of the poet Cowley, who
has in the Preface to his _Poems_ a charming passage about the relation
of literature to the external circumstances in which it is written.
"If _wit_ be such a _Plant_ that it scarce receives heat enough to keep
it alive even in the _summer_ of our cold _Clymate_, how can it choose
but wither in a long and a sharp _winter_? a warlike, various and a
tragical age is best to write _of_, but worst to write _in_." And he
adds this, concerning his own art of poetry: "There is nothing that
requires so much serenity and chearfulness of _spirit_; it must not be
either overwhelmed with the cares of _Life_, or overcast with the
_Clouds_ of _Melancholy_ and _Sorrow_, or shaken and disturbed with the
storms of injurious _Fortune_; it must, like the _Halcyon_, have fair
weather to breed in. The Soul must be filled with bright and delightful
_Idaeas_, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is
the main end of _Poesie_. One may see through the stile of _Ovid de
Trist._, the humbled and dejected condition of _Spirit_ with which he
wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that _Genius_, _Quem nec
Jovis ira, nec ignes_, etc. The _cold_ of the country has strucken
through all his faculties, and benummed the very _feet_ of his
_Verses_."
Madame de Stael's _Germany_, one of the most famous of the "national
character" books, begins with a description of the German landscape.
But though nobody, from Ovid in exile down to Madame de Stael,
questions the general significance of place, time, and circumstances as
affecting the nature of a literary product, when we come to the exact
and as it were mathematical demonstration of the precise workings of
these physical influences, our generation is distinctly more cautious
than were the literary critics of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a
hundred years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the theory that climate
acts directly upon literary products, said wittily of Greece: "The figs
are as fine as ever, but where are the Pindars?" The theory of race, in
particular, has been sharply questioned by the experts. "Saxon" and
"Norman," for example, no longer seem to us such simple terms as
sufficed for the purpose of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ or of Thierry's _Norman
Conquest_, a book inspired by Scott's romance. The late Professor
Freeman, with characteristic bluntness, remarked of the latter book:
"Thierry says at the end of his work that there are no longer either
Normans or Saxons except in history.... But in Thierry's sense of the
word, it would be truer to say that there never were 'Normans' or
'Saxons' anywhere, save in the pages of romances like his own."
There is a brutal directness about this verdict upon a rival historian
which we shall probably persist in calling "Saxon"; but it is no worse
than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's essay on "The Celtic Spirit"
made to-day by university professors who happen to know Old Irish at
first hand, and consequently consider Arnold's opinion on Celtic
matters to be hopelessly amateurish.
The wiser scepticism of our day concerning all hard-and-fast racial
distinctions has been admirably summed up by Josiah Royce. "A race
psychology," he declares, "is still a science for the future to
discover.... We do not scientifically know what the true racial
varieties of mental type really are. No doubt there are such varieties.
The judgment day, or the science of the future, may demonstrate what
they are. We are at present very ignorant regarding the whole matter."
Nowhere have the extravagances of the application of racial theories to
intellectual products been more pronounced than in the fields of art
and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz which the programme
declares to be an adaptation of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they
may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shakespeare was of Bohemia, they
have no hesitation in exclaiming: "How truly Hungarian this is!" Or,
it may be, how truly "Japanese" is this vase which was made in
Japan--perhaps for the American market; or how intensely "Russian" is
this melancholy tale by Turgenieff. This prompt deduction of racial
qualities from works of art which themselves give the critic all the
information he possesses about the races in question,--or, in other
words, the enthusiastic assertion that a thing is like itself,--is one
of the familiar notes of amateur criticism. It is travelling in a
circle, and the corregiosity of Corregio is the next station.
Blood tells, no doubt, and a masterpiece usually betrays some token of
the place and hour of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of
political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds immensely to the enjoyment
of the readers of Aristophanes; the fun becomes funnier and the daring
even more splendid than before. Moliere's training as an actor does
affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is
demonstrable, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our generation
is deeply indebted to Taine and his pupils. But before displaying
dogmatically the inevitable brandings of racial and national traits on
a national literature, before pointing to this and that unmistakable
evidence of local or temporal influence on the form or spirit of a
masterpiece, we are now inclined to make some distinct reservations.
These reservations are not without bearing upon our own literature in
America.
There are, for instance, certain artists who seem to escape the
influences of the time-spirit. The most familiar example is that of
Keats. He can no doubt be assigned to the George the Fourth period by a
critical examination of his vocabulary, but the characteristic
political and social movements of that epoch in England left him almost
untouched. Edgar Allan Poe might have written some of his tales in the
seventeenth century or in the twentieth; he might, like Robert Louis
Stevenson, have written in Samoa rather than in the Baltimore,
Philadelphia, or New York of his day; his description of the Ragged
Mountains of Virginia, within very sight of the university which he
attended, was borrowed, in the good old convenient fashion, from
Macaulay; in fact, it requires something of Poe's own ingenuity to find
in Poe, who is one of the indubitable assets of American literature,
anything distinctly American.
Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation of the single writer,
there is the obvious fact that none of the arts, not even literature,
and not all of them together, can furnish a wholly adequate
representation of racial or national characteristics. It is well known
to-day that the so-called "classic" examples of Greek art, most of
which were brought to light and discoursed upon by critics from two to
four centuries ago, represent but a single phase of Greek feeling; and
that the Greeks, even in what we choose to call their most
characteristic period, had a distinctly "romantic" tendency which their
more recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even if we had all
the lost statues, plays, poems, and orations, all the Greek paintings
about which we know so little, and the Greek music about which we know
still less, does anybody suppose that this wealth of artistic
expression would furnish a wholly satisfactory notion of the racial and
psychological traits of the Greek people?
One may go even further. Does a truly national art exist anywhere,--an
art, that is to say, which conveys a trustworthy and adequate
expression of the national temper as a whole? We have but to reflect
upon the European and American judgments, during the last thirty
years, concerning the representative quality of the art of Japan, and
to observe how many of those facile generalizations about the Japanese
character, deduced from vases and prints and enamel, were smashed to
pieces by the Russo-Japanese War. This may illustrate the blunders of
foreign criticism, perhaps, rather than any inadequacy in the racially
representative character of Japanese art. But it is impossible that
critics, and artists themselves, should not err, in the conscious
endeavor to pronounce upon the infinitely complex materials with which
they are called upon to deal. We must confess that the expression of
racial and national characteristics, by means of only one art, such as
literature, or by all the arts together, is at best imperfect, and is
always likely to be misleading unless corroborated by other evidence.
For it is to be remembered that in literature, as in the other fields
of artistic activity, we are dealing with the question of form; of
securing a concrete and pleasurable embodiment of certain emotions. It
may well happen that literature not merely fails to give an adequate
report of the racial or national or personal emotions felt during a
given epoch, but that it fails to report these emotions at all. Not
only the "old, unhappy, far-off" things of racial experience, but the
new and delight-giving experiences of the hour, may lack their poet.
Widespread moods of public elation or wistfulness or depression have
passed without leaving a shadow upon the mirror of art. There was no
one to hold the mirror or even to fashion it. No note of Renaissance
criticism, whether in Italy, France, or England, is more striking, and
in a way more touching, than the universal feeling that in the
rediscovery of the classics men had found at last the "terms of art,"
the rules and methods of a game which they had long wished to be
playing. Englishmen and Frenchmen of the sixteenth century will not
allow that their powers are less virile, their emotions less eager,
than those of the Greeks and Romans. Only, lacking the very terms of
art, they had not been able to arrive at fit expression; the soul had
found no body wherewith to clothe itself into beauty. As they avowed in
all simplicity, they needed schoolmasters; the discipline of Aristotle
and Horace and Virgil; a body of critical doctrine, to teach them how
to express the France and England or Italy of their day, and thus give
permanence to their fleeting vision of the world. Naive as may have
been the Renaissance expression of this need of formal training, blind
as it frequently was to the beauty which we recognize in the
undisciplined vernacular literatures of mediaeval Europe, those groping
scholars were essentially right. No one can paint or compose by nature.
One must slowly master an art of expression.
Now through long periods of time, and over many vast stretches of
territory, as our own American writing abundantly witnesses, the whole
formal side of expression may be neglected. "Literature," in its
narrower sense, may not exist. In that restricted and higher meaning of
the term, literature has always been uncommon enough, even in Athens or
Florence. It demands not merely personal distinction or power, not
merely some uncommon height or depth or breadth of capacity and
insight, but a purely artistic training, which in the very nature of
the case is rare. Millions of Russians, perhaps, have felt about the
general problems of life much as Turgenieff felt, but they lacked the
sheer literary art with which the _Notes of a Sportsman_ was written.
Thousands of frontier lawyers and politicians shared Lincoln's hard
and varied and admirable training in the mastery of speech, but in his
hands alone was the weapon wrought to such perfection of temper and
weight and edge that he spoke and wrote literature without knowing it.
Such considerations belong, I am aware, to the accepted
commonplaces,--perhaps to what William James used to call "the
unprofitable delineation of the obvious." Everybody recognizes that
literary gifts imply an exceptionally rich development of general human
capacities, together with a professional aptitude and training of which
but few men are capable. There is but one lumberman in camp who can
play the fiddle, though the whole camp can dance. Thus the great book,
we are forever saying, is truly representative of myriads of minds in a
certain degree of culture, although but one man could have written it.
The writing member of a family is often the one who acquires notoriety
and a bank account, but he is likely to have candid friends who admit,
though not always in his presence, that, aside from this one
professional gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emotionally
or spiritually superior to his brothers and sisters. Waldo Emerson
thought himself the intellectual inferior of his brother Charles; and
good observers loved to maintain that John Holmes was wittier than
Oliver Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer than Daniel.
Applied to the literary history of a race, this principle is
suggestive. We must be slow to affirm that, because certain ideas and
feelings did not attain, in this or that age or place, to purely
literary expression, they were therefore not in existence. The men and
women of the colonial period in our own country, for instance, have
been pretty uniformly declared to have been deficient in the sense of
beauty. What is the evidence? It is mostly negative. They produced no
poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, or music worthy of the name. They
were predominantly Puritan, and the whole world has been informed that
English Puritanism was hostile to Art. They were preoccupied with
material and moral concerns. Even if they had remained in England,
Professor Trent affirms, these contemporaries of Milton and Bunyan
would have produced no art or literature. Now it is quite true that for
nearly two hundred years after the date of the first settlement of the
American colonists, opportunities for cultivating the arts did not
exist. But that the sense of beauty was wholly atrophied, I, for one,
do not believe. The passionate eagerness with which the forefathers
absorbed the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their one
book, the Bible; the unwearied curiosity and care with which those
farmers and fishermen and woodsmen read the signs of the sky; their awe
of the dark wilderness and their familiar traffic with the great deep;
the silences of lonely places; the opulence of primeval meadows by the
clear streams; the English flowers that were made to bloom again in
farmhouse windows and along garden walks; the inner visions, more
lovely still, of duty and of moral law; the spirit of sacrifice; the
daily walk with God, whether by green pastures of the spirit or through
ways that were dark and terrible;--is there in all this no discipline
of the soul in moral beauty, and no training of the eye to perceive the
exquisite harmonies of the visible earth? It is true that the Puritans
had no professional men of letters; it is true that doctrinal sermons
provided their chief intellectual sustenance; true that their lives
were stern, and that many of the softer emotions were repressed. But
beauty may still be traced in the fragments of their recorded speech,
in their diaries and letters and phrases of devotion. You will search
the eighteenth century of old England in vain for such ecstasies of
wonder at the glorious beauty of the universe as were penned by
Jonathan Edwards in his youthful _Diary_. There is every presumption,
from what we know of the two men, that Whittier's father and
grandfather were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of home and
neighborhood and domesticity which their gifted descendant--too
physically frail to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm--has
embodied in _Snow-Bound_. The Quaker poet knew that he surpassed his
forefathers in facility in verse-making, but he would have been amused
(as his _Margaret Smith's Journal_ proves) at the notion that his
ancestors were without a sense of beauty or that they lacked
responsiveness to the chords of fireside sentiment. He was simply the
only Whittier, except his sister Elizabeth, who had ever found leisure,
as old-fashioned correspondents used to say, "to take his pen in hand."
This leisure developed in him the sense--latent no doubt in his
ancestors--of the beauty of words, and the excitement of rhythm.
Emerson's _Journal_ in the eighteen-thirties glows with a Dionysiac
rapture over what he calls "delicious days"; but did the seven
generations of clergymen from whom Emerson descended have no delicious
and haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded? Formal literature
perpetuates and glorifies many aspects of individual and national
experience; but how much eludes it wholly, or is told, if at all, in
broken syllables, in Pentecostal tongues that seem to be our own and
yet are unutterably strange!
To confess thus that literature, in the proper sense of the word,
represents but a narrow segment of personal or racial experience, is
very far from a denial of the genuineness and the significance of the
affirmations which literature makes. We recognize instinctively that
Whittier's _Snow-Bound_ is a truthful report, not merely of a certain
farmhouse kitchen in East Haverhill, Massachusetts, during the early
nineteenth century, but of a mode of thinking and feeling which is
widely diffused wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has wandered. Perhaps
_Snow-Bound_ lacks a certain universality of suggestiveness which
belongs to a still more famous poem, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ of
Burns, but both of these portrayals of rustic simplicity and peace owe
their celebrity to their truly representative character. They are
evidence furnished by a single art, as to a certain mode and coloring
of human existence; but every corroboration of that evidence heightens
our admiration for the artistic sincerity and insight of the poet. To
draw an illustration from a more splendid epoch, let us remind
ourselves that the literature of the "spacious times of great
Elizabeth"--a period of strong national excitement, and one deeply
representative of the very noblest and most permanent traits of English
national character--was produced within startlingly few years and in a
local territory extremely limited. The very language in which that
literature is clothed was spoken only by the court, by a couple of
counties, and at the two universities. Its prose and verse were frankly
experimental. It is true that such was the emotional ferment of the
score of years preceding the Armada, that great captains and voyagers
who scarcely wrote a line were hailed as kings of the realm of
imagination, and that Puttenham, in phrases which that generation
could not have found extravagant, inscribes his book on Poetry to Queen
Elizabeth as the "most excellent Poet" of the age. Well, the glorified
political images may grow dim or tawdry with time, but the poetry has
endured, and it is everywhere felt to be a truly national, a deeply
racial product. Its time and place and hour were all local; but the
Canadian and the American, the South African and Australasian
Englishman feels that that Elizabethan poetry is his poetry still.
When we pass, therefore, as we must shortly do, to the consideration of
this and that literary product of America, and to the scrutiny of the
really representative character of our books, we must bear in mind that
the questions concerning the race, the place, the hour, the
man,--questions so familiar to modern criticism,--remain valid and
indeed essential; but that in applying them to American writing there
are certain allowances, qualifications, adjustments of the scale of
values, which are no less important to an intelligent perception of the
quality of our literature. This task is less simple than the critical
assessment of a typical German or French or Scandinavian writer, where
the strain of blood is unmixed, the continuity of literary tradition
unbroken, the precise impact of historical and personal influences more
easy to estimate. I open, for example, any one of half a dozen French
studies of Balzac. Here is a many-sided man, a multifarious writer, a
personality that makes ridiculous the merely formal pigeon-holing and
labelling processes of professional criticism. And yet with what
perfect precision of method and certainty of touch do Le Breton, for
example, or Brunetiere, in their books on Balzac, proceed to indicate
those impulses of race and period and environment which affected the
character of Balzac's novels! The fact that he was born in Tours in
1799 results in the inevitable and inevitably expert paragraphs about
Gallic blood, and the physical exuberance of the Touraine surroundings
of his youth, and the post-revolutionary tendency to disillusion and
analysis. And so with Balzac's education, his removal to Paris in the
Restoration period, his ventures in business and his affairs of love,
his admiration for Shakespeare and for Fenimore Cooper; his mingled
Romanticism and Realism; his Titanism and his childishness; his
stupendous outline for the Human Comedy; and his scarcely less
astounding actual achievement. All this is discussed by his biographers
with the professional dexterity of critics trained intellectually in
the Latin traditions and instinctively aware of the claims of race,
biographers familiar with every page of French history, and profoundly
interested, like their readers, in every aspect of French life. Alas,
we may say, in despairing admiration of such workmanship, "they order
these things better in France." And they do; but racial unity, and long
lines of national literary tradition, make these things easier to order
than they are with us. The intellectual distinction of American
critical biographies like Lounsbury's _Cooper_ or Woodberry's
_Hawthorne_ is all the more notable because we possess such a slender
body of truly critical doctrine native to our own soil; because our
national literary tradition as to available material and methods is
hardly formed; because the very word "American" has a less precise
connotation than the word "New Zealander."
Let us suppose, for instance, that like Professor Woodberry a few years
ago, we were asked to furnish a critical study of Hawthorne. The author
of _The Scarlet Letter_ is one of the most justly famous of American
writers. But precisely what national traits are to be discovered in
this eminent fellow-countryman of ours? We turn, like loyal disciples
of Taine and Sainte-Beuve, to his ancestral stock. We find that it is
English as far back as it can be traced; as purely English as the
ancestry of Dickens or Thackeray, and more purely English than the
ancestry of Browning or Burke or His Majesty George the Fifth. Was
Hawthorne, then, simply an Englishman living in America? He himself did
not think so,--as his _English Note-Books_ abundantly prove. But just
what subtle racial differentiation had been at work, since William
Hawthorne migrated to Massachusetts with Winthrop in 1630? Here we
face, unless I am mistaken, that troublesome but fascinating question
of Physical Geography. Climate, soil, food, occupation, religious or
moral preoccupation, social environment, Salem witchcraft and Salem
seafaring had all laid their invisible hands upon the physical and
intellectual endowment of the child born in 1804. Does this make
Nathaniel Hawthorne merely an "Englishman with a difference," as Mr.
Kipling, born in India, is an "Englishman with a difference"?
Hawthorne would have smiled, or, more probably, he would have sworn, at
such a question. He considered himself an American Democrat; in fact a
_contra mundum_ Democrat, for good or for ill. Is it, then, a political
theory, first put into full operation in this country a scant
generation before Hawthorne's birth, which made him un-English? We must
walk warily here. Our Canadian neighbors of English stock have much the
same climate, soil, occupations, and preoccupations as the inhabitants
of the northern territory of the United States. They have much the same
courts, churches, and legislatures. They read the same books and
magazines. They even prefer baseball to cricket. They are loyal
adherents of a monarchy, but they are precisely as free, as
self-governing, and--in the social sense of the word--as
"democratic"--in spite of the absence of a republican form of
government--as the citizens of that "land of the free and home of the
brave" which lies to the south of them. Yet Canadian literature, one
may venture to affirm, has remained to this hour a "colonial"
literature, or, if one prefers the phrase, a literature of "Greater
Britain." Was Hawthorne possibly right in his instinct that politics
did make a difference, and that in writing _The Marble Faun_,--the
scene of which is laid in Rome,--or _The House of the Seven
Gables_,--which is a story of Salem,--he was consistently engaged in
producing, not "colonial" or "Greater-British" but distinctly American
literature? We need not answer this question prematurely, if we wish to
reserve our judgment, but it is assuredly one of the questions which
the biographers and critics of our men of letters must ultimately face
and answer.
Furthermore, the student of literature produced in the United States of
America must face other questions almost as complicated as this of
race. In fact, when we choose Hawthorne as a typical case in which to
observe the American refashioning of the English temper into something
not English, we are selecting a very simple problem compared with the
complexities which have resulted from the mingling of various European
stocks upon American soil. But take, for the moment, the mere obvious
matter of expanse of territory. We are obliged to reckon, not with a
compact province such as those in which many Old World literatures
have been produced, but with what our grandfathers considered a
"boundless continent." This vast national domain was long ago
"organized" for political purposes: but so far as literature is
concerned it remains unorganized to-day. We have, as has been
constantly observed, no literary capital, like London or Paris, to
serve as the seat of centralized authority; no code of literary
procedure and conduct; no "lawgivers of Parnassus"; no supreme court of
letters, whose judgments are recognized and obeyed. American public
opinion asserts itself with singular unanimity and promptness in the
field of politics. In literary matters we remain in the stage of
anarchic individualism, liable to be stampeded from time to time by
mob-excitement over a popular novel or moralistic tract, and then
disintegrating, as before, into an incoherent mass of individually
intelligent readers.
The reader who has some personal acquaintance with the variations of
type in different sections of this immense territory of ours finds his
curiosity constantly stimulated by the presence of sectional and local
characteristics. There are sharply cut provincial peculiarities, of
course, in Great Britain and in Germany, in Italy and Spain, and in
all of the countries a corresponding "regional" literature has been
developed. Our provincial variations of accent and vocabulary, in
passing from North to South or East to West, are less striking, on the
whole, than the dialectical differences found in the various English
counties. But our general uniformity of grammar and the comparatively
slight variations in spoken accent cover an extraordinary variety of
local and sectional modes of thinking and feeling. The reader of
American short stories and lyrics must constantly ask himself: Is this
truth to local type consistent with the main trend of American
production? Is this merely a bit of Virginia or Texas or California, or
does it, while remaining no less Southern or Western in its local
coloring, suggest also the ampler light, the wide generous air of the
United States of America?
The observer of this relationship between local and national types will
find some American communities where all the speech or habitual thought
is of the future. Foreigners usually consider such communities the most
typically "American," as doubtless they are; but there are other
sections, still more faithfully exploited by local writers, where the
mood is wistful and habitually regards the past. America, too, like the
Old World,--and in New England more than elsewhere,--has her note of
decadence, of disillusion, of autumnal brightness and transiency. Some
sections of the country, and notably the slave-holding states in the
forty years preceding the Civil War, have suffered widespread
intellectual blight. The best talent of the South, for a generation,
went into politics, in the passionately loyal endeavor to prop up a
doomed economic and social system; and the loss to the intellectual
life of the country cannot be reckoned. Over vast sections of our
prosperous and intelligent people of the Mississippi Basin to-day the
very genius of commonplaceness seems to hover. Take the great State of
Iowa, with its well-to-do and homogeneous population, its fortunate
absence of perplexing city-problems, its general air of prosperity and
content. It is a typical state of the most typically American portion
of the country; but it breeds no books. Yet in Indiana, another state
of the same general conditions as to population and prosperity, and
only one generation further removed than Iowa from primitive pioneer
conditions, books are produced at a rate which provokes a universal
American smile. I do not affirm that the literary critic is bound to
answer all such local puzzles as this. But he is bound at least to
reflect upon them, and to demand of every local literary product
throughout this varied expanse of states: Is the root of the
"All-American" plant growing here, or is it not?
Furthermore, the critic must pursue this investigation of national
traits in our writing, not only over a wide and variegated territory,
but through a very considerable sweep of time. American literature is
often described as "callow," as the revelation of "national
inexperience," and in other similar terms. It is true that we had no
professional men of letters before Irving and that the blossoming time
of the notable New England group of writers did not come until nearly
the middle of the nineteenth century. But we have had time enough,
after all, to show what we wish to be and what we are. There have been
European books about America ever since the days of Columbus; it is
three hundred years since the first books were written in America.
Modern English prose, the language of journalism, of science, of social
intercourse, came into being only in the early eighteenth century, in
the age of Queen Anne. But Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_, a vast book
dealing with the past history of New England, was printed in 1702, only
a year later than Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_. For more than two
centuries the development of English speech and English writing on this
side of the Atlantic has kept measurable pace--now slower, now
swifter--with the speech of the mother country. When we recall the
scanty term of years within which was produced the literature of the
age of Elizabeth, it seems like special pleading to insist that America
has not yet had time to learn or recite her bookish lessons.
This is not saying that we have had a continuous or adequate
development, either of the intellectual life, or of literary
expression. There are certain periods of strong intellectual movement,
of heightened emotion, alike in the colonial epoch and since the
adoption of our present form of government, in which it is natural to
search for revelations of those qualities which we now feel to be
essential to our national character. Certain epochs of our history, in
other words, have been peculiarly "American," and have furnished the
most ideal expression of national tendencies.
If asked to select the three periods of our history which in this sense
have been most significant, most of us, I imagine, would choose the
first vigorous epoch of New England Puritanism, say from 1630 to 1676;
then, the epoch of the great Virginians, say from 1766 to 1789; and
finally the epoch of distinctly national feeling, in which New England
and the West were leaders, between 1830 and 1865. Those three
generations have been the most notable in the three hundred years since
the permanent settlements began. Each of them has revealed, in a noble
fashion, the political, ethical, and emotional traits of our people;
and although the first two of the three periods concerned themselves
but little with literary expression of the deep-lying characteristics
of our stock, the expression is not lacking. Thomas Hooker's sermon on
the "Foundation of Political Authority," John Winthrop's grave advice
on the "Nature of Liberty," Jefferson's "Declaration," Webster's "Reply
to Hayne," Lincoln's "Inaugurals," are all fundamentally American.
They are political in their immediate purpose, but, like the speeches
of Edmund Burke, they are no less literature because they are concerned
with the common needs and the common destiny. Hooker and Winthrop wrote
before our formal national existence began; Jefferson, at the hour of
the nation's birth; and Lincoln, in the day of its sharpest trial. Yet,
though separated from one another by long intervals of time, the
representative figures of the three epochs, English in blood and
American in feeling, are not so unlike as one might think. A thorough
grasp of our literature thus requires--and in scarcely less a degree
than the mastery of one of the literatures of Europe--a survey of a
long period, the search below the baffling or contradictory surface of
national experience for the main drift of that experience, and the
selection of the writers, of one generation after another, who have
given the most fit and permanent and personalized expression to the
underlying forces of the national life.
There is another preliminary word which needs no less to be said. It
concerns the question of international influences upon national
literature. Our own generation has been taught by many events that no
race or country can any longer live "to itself." Internationalism is in
the very atmosphere: and not merely as regards politics in the narrowed
sense, but with reference to questions of economics, sociology, art,
and letters. The period of international isolation of the United
States, we are rather too fond of saying, closed with the
Spanish-American War. It would be nearer the truth to say that so far
as the things of the mind and the spirit are concerned, there has never
been any absolute isolation. The Middle West, from the days of Jackson
to Lincoln, that raw West described by Dickens and Mrs. Trollope, comes
nearer isolation than any other place or time. The period of the most
eloquent assertions of American independence in artistic and literary
matters was the epoch of New England Transcendentalism, which was
itself singularly cosmopolitan in its literary appetites. The letters
and journals of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau show the strong European
meat on which these men fed, just before their robust declarations of
our self-sufficiency. But there is no real self-sufficiency, and
Emerson and Whitman themselves, in other moods, have written most
suggestive passages upon our European inheritances and affiliations.
The fortunes of the early New England colonies, in fact, were followed
by Protestant Europe with the keen solicitude and affection of kinsmen.
Oliver Cromwell signs his letter to John Cotton in 1651, "Your
affectionate friend to serve you." The settlements were regarded as
outposts of European ideas. Their Calvinism, so cheaply derided and so
superficially understood, even to-day, was the intellectual platform of
that portion of Europe which was mentally and morally awake to the vast
issues involved in individual responsibility and self-government.
Contemporary European democracy is hardly yet aware that Calvin's
_Institutes_ is one of its great charters. Continental Protestantism of
the seventeenth century, like the militant Republicanism of the English
Commonwealth, thus perused with fraternal interest the letters from
Massachusetts Bay. And if Europe watched America in those days, it was
no less true that America was watching Europe. Towards the end of the
century, Cotton Mather, "prostrate in the dust" before the Lord, as
his newly published _Diary_ tells us, is wrestling "on the behalf of
whole nations." He receives a "strong Persuasion that very overturning
Dispensations of Heaven will quickly befal the French Empire"; he
"lifts up his Cries for a mighty and speedy Revolution" there. "I
spread before the Lord the Condition of His Church abroad ...
especially in Great Britain and in France. And I prayed that the poor
Vaudois may not be ruined by the Peace now made between France and
Savoy. I prayed likewise for further Mortifications upon the Turkish
Empire." Here surely was one colonial who was trying, in Cecil Rhodes's
words, to "think continentally!"
Furthermore, the leaders of those early colonies were in large measure
university men, disciplined in the classics, fit representatives of
European culture. It has been reckoned that between the years 1630 and
1690 there were in New England as many graduates of Cambridge and
Oxford as could be found in any population of similar size in the
mother country. At one time during those years there was in
Massachusetts and Connecticut alone a Cambridge graduate for every two
hundred and fifty inhabitants. Like the exiled Greeks in Matthew
Arnold's poem, they "undid their corded bales"--of learning, it is
true, rather than of merchandise--upon these strange and inhospitable
shores: and the traditions of Greek and Hebrew and Latin scholarship
were maintained with no loss of continuity. To the lover of letters
there will always be something fine in the thought of that narrow
seaboard fringe of faith in the classics, widening slowly as the
wilderness gave way, making its invisible road up the rivers, across
the mountains, into the great interior basin, and only after the Civil
War finding an enduring home in the magnificent state universities of
the West. Lovers of Greek and Roman literature may perhaps always feel
themselves pilgrims and exiles in this vast industrial democracy of
ours, but they have at least secured for us, and that from the very
first day of the colonies, some of the best fruitage of
internationalism. For that matter, what was, and is, that one Book--to
the eyes of the Protestant seventeenth century infallible and
inexpressively sacred--but the most potent and universal commerce of
ideas and spirit, passing from the Orient, through Greek and Roman
civilization, into the mind and heart of Western Europe and America?
"Oh, East is East, and West is West,
And never the twain shall meet,"
declares a confident poet of to-day. But East and West met long ago in
the matchless phrases translated from Hebrew and Greek and Latin into
the English Bible; and the heart of the East there answers to the heart
of the West as in water face answereth to face. That the colonizing
Englishmen of the seventeenth century were Hebrews in spiritual
culture, and heirs of Greece and Rome without ceasing to be Anglo-Saxon
in blood, is one of the marvels of the history of civilization, and it
is one of the basal facts in the intellectual life of the United States
of to-day.
Yet that life, as I have already hinted, is not so simple in its terms
as it might be if we had to reckon merely with the men of a single
stock, albeit with imaginations quickened by contact with an Oriental
religion, and minds disciplined, directly or indirectly, by the methods
and the literatures which the Revival of Learning imposed upon modern
Europe. American formal culture is, and has been, from the beginning,
predominantly English. Yet it has been colored by the influences of
other strains of race, and by alien intellectual traditions. Such
international influences as have reached us through German and
Scandinavian, Celtic and Italian, Russian and Jewish immigration, are
well marked in certain localities, although their traces may be
difficult to follow in the main trend of American writing. The presence
of Negro, Irishman, Jew, and German, has affected our popular humor and
satire, and is everywhere to be marked in the vocabulary and tone of
our newspapers. The cosmopolitan character of the population of such
cities as New York and Chicago strikes every foreign observer. Each one
of the manifold races now transplanted here and in process of
Americanization has for a while its own newspapers and churches and
social life carried on in a foreign dialect. But this stage of
evolution passes swiftly. The assimilative forces of American schools,
industry, commerce, politics, are too strong for the foreign immigrant
to resist. The Italian or Greek fruit pedler soon prefers to talk
English, and his children can be made to talk nothing else. This
extraordinary amalgamating power of English culture explains, no
doubt, why German and Scandinavian immigration--to take examples from
two of the most intelligent and educated races that have contributed to
the up-building of the country--have left so little trace, as yet, upon
our more permanent literature.
But blood will have its say sooner or later. No one knows how
profoundly the strong mentality of the Jew, already evident enough in
the fields of manufacturing and finance, will mould the intellectual
life of the United States. The mere presence, to say nothing of the
rapid absorption, of these millions upon millions of aliens, as the
children of the Puritans regard them, is a constant evidence of the
subtle ways in which internationalism is playing its part in the
fashioning of the American temper. The moulding hand of the German
university has been laid upon our higher institutions of learning for
seventy years, although no one can demonstrate in set terms whether the
influence of Goethe, read now by three generations of American scholars
and studied by millions of youth in the schools, has left any real mark
upon our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store-keeping days, used
to sit under a tree outside the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry,
reading Voltaire. One would like to think that he then and there
assimilated something of the incomparable lucidity of style of the
great Frenchman. But Voltaire's influence upon Lincoln's style cannot
be proved, any more than Rousseau's direct influence upon Jefferson.
Tolstoi and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American
imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris
was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the
prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon
experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse
toward writing his Western stories came to him after reading the
delightful pages of a French romancer. But all this tells us merely
what we knew well enough before: that from colonial days to the present
hour the Atlantic has been no insuperable barrier between the thought
of Europe and the mind of America; that no one race bears aloft all the
torches of intellectual progress; and that a really vital writer of any
country finds a home in the spiritual life of every other country, even
though it may be difficult to find his name in the local directory.